I’m back! I’ve decided to give blogging another try. Maybe I’ll find my blogging groove this time around. Or maybe I just like playing around with WordPress!
I was recently introduced to OpenSolaris, the open source version of the Solaris operating system. I downloaded the base system from the OpenSolaris web site and installed it into a VMware Workstation virtual machine. The installation was easy. However, the Solaris VMware Tools that come with my version of VMware Workstation (v6.0.3) do not seem happy with OpenSolaris. I have not yet looked into why. Fortunately the system seems to run adequately without VMware Tools.
OpenSolaris installs with a GNOME desktop and so visually it looks a lot like many Linux systems. It doesn’t take much poking around, though, to start seeing differences. For one thing, the base system lacks a lot of packages that I consider essential… such as a C compiler. I’m sure many additional packages can be readily obtained (for example, through the package manager!) although I haven’t looked into doing that yet.
In fact I haven’t spent much time so far exploring the system, and so I can’t say much about it right now. My first impressions are favorable, however. It seems clean and well behaved. I may write about OpenSolaris again in the future once I’ve gained more experience with it.
Technically Rambling 
Hi
Kudos from down under. I too dabbled into OpenSolaris but sadly while more robust kernel-wise “that’s not where the action is” so to speak. new hardware often gets Linux drivers first, then FreeBSD ports of such drivers later, and only several months to a year+ late, OpenSolaris drivers.
So I prefer to run Fedora Linux. Since it runs Gnome it’s the same as OpenSolaris from a visual point of view, but free, and what I learn serves me for Red Hat Linux server as well.
I noticed your OpenWatcom pages, very interesting. I wonder if you’re aware if there’s other people (besides you) working on the project? I mean… I really had high hopes they would finish the Linux support and have Win32-Linux-OS2 binaries available.
Regards,
FC
Thanks for your comment. Actually I’m the Open Watcom maintainer so I’m very much plugged into that community. In fact I recently started an Open Watcom specific blog at http://owreflections.blogspot.com/.
The Open Watcom Linux support is evolving slowly, but there is much that remains to be done. The Linux target is included in the recent installers so it is possible, for example, to build text mode Linux binaries on a Windows machine using the “standard” distribution. Our build servers also construct experimental Linux installers. but to be honest I’m not sure how well they work (I haven’t tried them!). See:
http://owbuilder.ecet.vtc.edu/snapshot/
(Note this URL is going to change soon to http://owbuilder.cis.vtc.edu/snapshot). The installers are near the bottom. NOTE: These are just daily snapshots, not official releases.